> The precise location in the sky where the signal apparently originated is uncertain due to the design of the Big Ear telescope, which featured two feed horns, each receiving a beam from slightly different directions, while following Earth's rotation. The Wow! signal was detected in one beam but not in the other[...]
This part intrigues me, or at least seems like an important piece of the puzzle, ruling out local causes of the signal that would affect both horns.
> In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, the Arecibo Observatory was said to have beamed a digital stream towards Hipparcos 34511, 33277, and 43587.[45] The transmission consisted of approximately 10,000 Twitter messages solicited for the purpose by the National Geographic Channel, bearing the hashtag "#ChasingUFOs" (a promotion for one of the channel's TV series).[46] The sponsor also included a series of video vignettes featuring verbal messages from various celebrities.
What an inane, embarrassing "response", if the original was any attempt to communicate. (Sounds like it probably was not, but still...)
For context (since this reply seems to be getting downvoted into faded-text status at the time I am seeing it, perhaps in part because these days people might be seeing this as a political viewpoint for...reasons):
In Carl Sagan's "Contact" the first message we get from another civilization is a rebroadcast of a Hitler rally in the run-up to the 1936 Olympic games.
In the story, as one of the early examples of broadcasted television this rally happened to be the first broadcast from us that was detected by the civilization at Vega, and they rebroadcast it back to us as part of their larger signal inviting us to come say hi.
Effectively a coincidence that it happened to be fascist in nature, but causing some amount of panic in the story from people who read into this as the aliens being pro-fascist.
it's just a CW carrier with no observable modulation for 72 seconds, the time the telescope would be expected to observe a transmission based on the movement of the earth
How do you know this? AFAIK the raw I/Q values, voltage levels aren't recorded anywhere. The printout only shows the integrated signal strength over 10s periods.
I'm referring to the recorded signal with the 10 second period. If the modulation period was greater than 10 seconds there could be observable modulation. For all we know the actual transmission was a high speed data burst showing us how to build faster than light travel.
A near-perfect sinewave is pretty much what you'd expect (and in fact will receive) at the H-line, since it represents a difference in quantum energy levels, specifically the hyperfine interaction due to flipping the electron-versus-proton spin direction. Any sort of modulation on a 1420-MHz signal would be much more interesting.
What was interesting about the Wow signal is simply how strong it was compared to the expected 1420 MHz background.
Radio astronomy is full of anecdotes like that. My favorite is the 2450 MHz emission that was found to be caused by people in the breakroom opening the microwave oven door before hitting the 'Stop' button.
I'm reminded of the exciting signal at Parkes Observatory that turned out to be the microwave oven making an astronomers lunch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-05/scientists-discover-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...
If all the modern sophisticated alien signal has detected zero then we really have to stop obsessing about the wow signal from 1977.
This part intrigues me, or at least seems like an important piece of the puzzle, ruling out local causes of the signal that would affect both horns.
> In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, the Arecibo Observatory was said to have beamed a digital stream towards Hipparcos 34511, 33277, and 43587.[45] The transmission consisted of approximately 10,000 Twitter messages solicited for the purpose by the National Geographic Channel, bearing the hashtag "#ChasingUFOs" (a promotion for one of the channel's TV series).[46] The sponsor also included a series of video vignettes featuring verbal messages from various celebrities.
What an inane, embarrassing "response", if the original was any attempt to communicate. (Sounds like it probably was not, but still...)
In Carl Sagan's "Contact" the first message we get from another civilization is a rebroadcast of a Hitler rally in the run-up to the 1936 Olympic games.
In the story, as one of the early examples of broadcasted television this rally happened to be the first broadcast from us that was detected by the civilization at Vega, and they rebroadcast it back to us as part of their larger signal inviting us to come say hi.
Effectively a coincidence that it happened to be fascist in nature, but causing some amount of panic in the story from people who read into this as the aliens being pro-fascist.
"The Message From Vega":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRD-tO7jV9U
https://open.spotify.com/album/6TObgE5QDLYzA3Exu5vGhS
Which sounds like swamp gas in space, but what do I know.
https://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Wow-Searching-Extraterrestria...
Asked differently, if I looked at this signal in an oscilloscope, would it be a perfect sine wave at the hydrogen line frequency?
That's got to be an alien transmitting that.
What was interesting about the Wow signal is simply how strong it was compared to the expected 1420 MHz background.
Radio astronomy is full of anecdotes like that. My favorite is the 2450 MHz emission that was found to be caused by people in the breakroom opening the microwave oven door before hitting the 'Stop' button.